General Question

Significance of church bell "songs"?

Down the road from my parent’s place is an Anglican Church (I think that it’s Anglican). Everyday at noon, the church bells play songs for about half an hour. Just wondering if there’s significance here?

Honestly, they probably do it because it’s pretty. Church bells just before service were/are a call to worship so that anyone traveling can find the church and anyone working knows to go to church. But in this day and age it’s mostly just a mix of tradition and something pretty.

The bells at my school played all sorts of awesome stuff when the students got to the controls (they were electronic). But every day at 5pm, they played SOMETHING. And that way, no matter where you were on campus, you knew what time it was.

@EmpressPixie It is pretty. The church is a block over from my parent’s place and when you’re sitting outside on a nice summer day, you hear the bells and you feel all relaxed. Sounds weird, but, it’s actually soothing.

The traditional Anglican liturgical cycle dictated offices (or prayer services) at various points in the day. The modern Anglican prayer book has “orders of service” for morning, noonday, and evening offices. So maybe this church is just using the music as a commemoration of the noonday offices

If you have a full carillon of bells that can play hymns, and the neighbors don’t complain, you may as well use it.

@Judi: One significant improvement to Fluther would be an “ignore user” feature.

@Harp: the Anglican daily services are morning prayer and evening prayer; that was simplified in the very early days of the church, as a part of standardizing worship practices all over England. It’s one of the things that set the Anglicans apart from the Roman Catholics in the early days—RCs had matins, lauds, prime, terce, sext, nones, vespers, compline, while Anglicans had morning and evening.

“These services lie behind Anglican Morning and Evening Prayer, and also the Noonday and Compline services in the current book…The noonday hour is the hour when Jesus hung on the cross…In the Noonday Service we find the collect,“Blessed Savior, at this hour you hung upon the cross, stretching out your loving arms…”

@Harp: of course. There are liturgies for every possible thing you could think of, and many of the descendants of the Oxford movement celebrate all the liturgical hours. This doesn’t mean they’re necessary, or even necessarily beneficial.

@cwilbur Whether it’s necessary or beneficial, I have no idea, but it is one of the four prayer services in the Book of Common Prayer used by the Anglican Communion in the US. A quick Google search reveals noonday services held in lots of Anglican churches, so I guess they see some basis for it. Perhaps the church jmah hears is one of these.